February 2014 – Climate and Environment at Imperial

Moving from tactics to strategy: extreme weather, climate risks and the policy response

18 February 2014

By Dr Flora MacTavish and Dr Simon Buckle

In the press coverage of the recent floods, there has been a lot of discussion about whether the authorities could have been better prepared or responded more effectively. The National Farmers Union has called for the reintroduction of river dredging, although experts argue that dredging may be limited in its effectiveness. Local authorities have been criticised by experts for distributing sand bags rather than encouraging the use of more effective alternatives such as wooden or metal boards.

These are essentially tactical issues, however. It is the government and local authorities that have the vital strategic responsibility for fully embedding weather and climate risks into decisions on the level and focus of investment into flood defences and planning regulations about what can be built and where.

The persistence of the weather pattern that has caused this winter’s exceptional rainfall and floods has been very unusual. However, as the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee noted in their 2011 report, heat waves, droughts and floods are all expected to get worse as a result of climate change. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of the science (AR5) concluded that average precipitation was very likely to increase in the high and some of the mid latitudes, with a likely increase in the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events over land (see our note on The Changing Water Cycle). If we are to improve our resilience, we need to get the strategic policy framework and incentives right.

Unfortunately, for flood risk, this doesn’t seem to be happening yet, despite the Pitt Review after the 2007 floods. In 2011, the Climate Change Committee noted a decline in urban green space in each of six of local authority areas studied, and an increase in hard surfacing in five of the six. The Committee’s 2012 report showed that the UK has become more exposed to future flood risk. It judged that four times as many households and businesses in England could be at risk of flooding in the next twenty years if further steps are not taken to prepare for climate change.

In particular it noted that:

Development within the floodplain in England has grown at a faster rate (12%) than development outside it (7%) over the past ten years;
One in five properties built in the floodplain have been in areas of significant flood risk:
Levels of investment in flood defences and uptake rates of protection measures for individual properties will not keep pace with the increasing risks of flooding due to climate change.

The Committee has acknowledged that the economic and social benefits of new developments may not always be outweighed by the risks of building on flood plains. Decision makers should weigh up the trade-offs between long term risks such as climate change and other shorter term priorities, but the Committee judged that this was not happening “widely or consistently” at the time they wrote their 2011 report.

The government is in the process of trying to implement the Flood Re scheme to address concerns over the affordability and availability of flood insurance, but as our colleagues at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE have noted in their response to the government consultation,

“The design of the Flood Re scheme, which is expected to last until at least 2035, has not taken into account adequately, if at all, how flood risk is being affected by climate change. For this reason, it is likely to be put under increasing pressure and may prove to be unsustainable because the number of properties in future that will be at moderate and high probability of flooding has been significantly underestimated. “

Whether or not these particular floods are due to climate change, this is the sort of thing we expect to see more of in the future. When the immediate crisis is over, the government needs to think hard about its strategic response, which must include mitigation action as well as measures to develop greater resilience to weather and climate related risks.

Workshop on climate science needed to support robust adaptation decisions

Emma Critchley

14 February 2014

By Dr Simon Buckle

I just wanted to highlight the great event we held last week with Judy Curry at Georgia Tech on how we can use climate science to help us make better decisions – in business, government, health and development. Do have a look at the presentations from the really diverse group we managed to assemble in Atlanta, from international organisations, business, development agencies, NGOs and research.

A few points strike me as worth (re)emphasising:

Climate models are extremely valuable tools for assessing climate change over the rest of this century, but even the most advanced climate models are not yet able to provide detailed information with sufficient confidence on the variability and change of regional climate in the next few decades. This will take time and money (higher resolution, more computational power).
So trying to forecast the climate in 5, 10 or 20 years time is right at the research frontier, but many decision makers aren’t as hung up over the uncertainties in climate projections as the scientists. They’re used to dealing with uncertainty and some of the factors they need to take into account are way more uncertain than how the climate will change;
It’s the holistic view of risk that matters. In other words, how climate variability and change interacts with other factors such as population, urbanisation, economic growth, degradation of ecosystems, land use change etc;
Scientists working on decision relevant issues need to think really hard about the decision making context. Who is making decisions? What is the motivation? What is being decided and what are the relevant timescales? And are the research methods and outputs relevant and informative? Are there alternative approaches that might increase the robustness of decision making in the face of uncertainty? Are the limitations of the research transparent to the decision makers who might use it?
Many different approaches are emerging from collaboration among decision makers and scientists that can supplement the valuable insights gleaned from climate models and help inform robust decision making in the face of climate variability and change.
Even if some prominent UK politicians still have their heads in the sand over climate risks, major businesses, governments and development organisations are already factoring climate into their decision making.

You can read a more detailed summary of the workshop on the Grantham Institute website.

Climate change and health risks – new commission launched

Emma Critchley

10 February 2014

By Siân Williams, Research postgraduate, Department of Physics and Grantham Institute for Climate Change

healthv3 — Georgina Mace and other panelists at the UCL Institute of Global Health event on 16 January. Photo: S. Williams

In 2009 a joint report between University College London and The Lancet stated, “Climate change is the biggest risk to global health of the 21^st century”. The work highlighted extreme weather events, changing patterns of disease and food and water insecurity.

Now a second UCL-Lancet commission is underway. Last month, UCL’s Institute of Global Health hosted a launch event for the report entitled ‘Climate crisis: emergency actions to protect human health’.

The event was chaired by UCL’s Anthony Costello, head of the first Lancet commission. Panellists involved in the new commission include scientists and economists from UCL, Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The new commission is structured with five working groups. Its aims range from drawing out the key implications of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on health through to assessing the financial and policy mechanisms available to governments to protect their citizens against the worst impacts of climate change.

The format of the event allowed a wide range of issues to be discussed. These included the impacts of climate on mental health and the disillusion felt by many towards the COP international climate negotiation process.

Isobel Braithwaite, from the student-led Healthy Planet organisation, commented that “The first UCL-Lancet commission really served to shift the discussion away from climate change being just about ice caps and polar bears to an issue that’s ultimately about people’s health, so it’s exciting to hear that a second commission’s now underway. It sounds like this second one will go into much more depth on the actions we need to take to avert the major health crisis posed by unmitigated climate change”.

At the most recent COP negotiations in Warsaw, Healthy Planet formed part of the protest movement against Poland’s plans for future coal plants. The topic of climate and health will continue to be in the spotlight during Health Planet’s national conference, which will take place over the first weekend of March. Tickets for the event are available here.

The TROPICS research cruise from Tenerife to Trinidad: Tracing oceanic processes using corals and sediments

Emma Critchley

10 February 2014

By Torben Struve, Research Postgraduate, Department of Earth Science & Engineering and Grantham Institute for Climate Change

How to start a retrospective on two amazing months at sea? Probably at the beginning! In the beginning there was…an idea! The idea was to reconstruct abrupt changes in chemistry and ocean circulation in the Equatorial Atlantic Ocean to learn about global climate and deep-water habitats. The plan was to do so by collecting sediments, seawater and deep sea corals and analysing all of these for their geochemical composition.

Developing this idea into our actual scientific cruise, JC094, took several years of planning and preparation, led by principal investigator and chief scientist Dr. Laura Robinson (University of Bristol) and funded by the European Research Council. The closer the day of embarkation, the busier the participants: on the one hand everyone has to pass medical examinations and safety training courses and on the other hand getting all scientific equipment sorted before leaving port is very important as it is too late to receive mail deliveries once at sea!

Left: The RRS James Cook at the dock in Tenerife (Photo by: Torben Struve). Right: Science party of expedition JC094. Standing row (left to right): Martin Bridger, James Cooper, Paul Morris, Lucy Woodall, Mélanie Douarin, Stephanie Bates, Michelle Taylor, Allison Jacobel, Veerle Huvenne, Leigh Marsh, Vanessa Fairbank, Kais Mohamed Falcon, Shannon Hoy, Maricel Williams, Peter Spooner, Laura Robinson, Marcus Badger. Sitting row: Jesse van der Grient, Kate Hendry, Torben Struve, Hong Chin Ng. (Photo by: Sam Crimmin)

We were lucky that our vessel, the 89.5 m long RRS James Cook, was docked in Southampton before our cruise, giving us the opportunity to spend a few days at the National Oceanographic Center (NOC) in Southampton to prepare the science facilities on board so that the labs and our equipment are ready-to-go once we were at sea. Our swimming laboratory, the RRS James Cook sailed ahead of us and we met her again for embarkation in Tenerife on the 13^th October. On the afternoon of the 13^th October we left the port of Tenerife. Although this was our last land experience for seven weeks every participant of this multi-national expedition (British, US, French, Dutch, Belgian, Malaysian, Spanish and German) was excited about finally launching JC094.

Our aim was to collect of a wide range of sample material in order to unravel modern and past secrets of the deep equatorial Atlantic Ocean.

The Atlantic Ocean is separated into two basins by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR which is part of a global sub-marine mountain range) allowing only restricted deep-water exchange between these basins via the Vema Fracture Zone. The measurement of modern seawater properties is crucial for achieving our scientific goals. The distribution patterns of deep-sea species in the modern ocean are poorly understood and are, besides seafloor topography most likely linked to seawater chemistry. Reconstructions of past ocean properties (paleoceanography) are based on proxies extracted from marine archives, i.e. past seawater properties are reconstructed with chemical tracers extracted for instance from marine carbonates like foraminifera (single-celled organisms) shells or deep-sea corals. Such proxy work relies on modern calibrations of the chemical tracer extracted from live specimen against seawater.

For this purpose we aimed to collect seawater, sediment and a wide range of biological samples including the most-desired deep-sea corals. Our five sampling locations spanned across the equatorial Atlantic from east to west: Carter and Knipovich seamounts in the eastern basin, the Vema fracture zone at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Vayda and Gramberg seamounts in the western basin.

During the expedition the science party was divided into two 12 hour shifts from 4am(pm) to 4pm(am) covering a day’s 24 hour cycle. Each scientist was trained in various methods and techniques in order to help dealing with all the different types of sampling techniques applied during JC094: seawater sampling with a CTD rosette, hydroacoustic surveying, long and short coring as well as collecting and processing coral samples collected with the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) ISIS.

Cruise track of JC094 from Tenerife to Trinidad. EBA: Carter seamount; EBB: Knipovich seamount; VEM: Vema Fracture Zone; VAY: Vayda seamount; GRM: Gramberg seamount. (Map created by: Shannon Hoy)

Seawater sampling with a CTD rosette:

Seawater is usually sampled with a CTD rosette (conductivity-temperature-depth) measuring various seawater properties online and collecting seawater samples at particular depths with the 24 Niskin bottles attached to the frame. At every sample location we started our scientific program with a CTD profile. A CTD profile across the entire water column (~4500 m water depth) took about 4 hours making sample collection a time-consuming business. Once back on deck, the actual work started with sampling the Niskin bottles for dissolved oxygen, carbonate chemistry, radiocarbon, nutrients and trace elements following a strict scheme. This could usually be done within one 12 hour shift and the day shift (4 am to 4 pm) had the privilege of processing all CTD rosettes during JC094.

Meanwhile, the ship moved on for hydroacoustic surveying of the sampling location. Such hydroacoustic surveys are crucial to determine good locations for sediment coring and ROV dives since most deep-sea floor in the area has never been mapped.

Photo 3 (seawater): Procedure of seawater sampling with a CTD rosette. (1) Sensors reporting back to main lab computer, (2) recovery of the CTD rosette, (3,4) seawater sampling from Niskin bottles and (5) sealed and labeled seawater samples for oxygen isotope analyses (Photos by: (1,2) Torben Struve, (3) Mélanie Douarin, (4,5) Vanessa Fairbank)

Deep-sea sediment sampling:

The sediment coring efforts focused on recovery of surface material, and combined with long cores reaching back to at least the Last Glacial Maximum, i.e. 20,000 years ago. The rate of sediment deposition in the deep sea is on the order of 1-3 cm per 1,000 years and may be dominated by foraminiferal shells. During JC094 we used two different coring techniques: long coring and short coring.

Long coring allows deep penetration of a metal barrel (we used 12 m long barrels) into the sediment providing long sediment records. Once on deck, long cores are cut into 1.5 m segments, split into two halves and sub-sampled for chemical and physical analyses. As a result of the long coring technique the top part of the sediment column (sediment-seawater interface) is disturbed/lost.

Photo 5 (Long coring): Long coring work flow. (1) Coring device is back at the surface, (2) metal barrel needs to be aligned along starboard before it can be craned back on deck, (3) pulling the core liner (yellow tube) holding the sediments out of the metal barrel and cutting the liner into sections, (4) splitting the core liner sections into two halves: work and archive, (5) archive half of ~ five meter long sediment core and (6) D-tube which is used for long-term storage of sediment core sections. (Photos by: (1,2,4) Torben Struve, (3,5) Mélanie Douarin, (6) Stephanie Bates)

Megacoring allows collection of undisturbed short cores so that both coring techniques complement one another. Most of the short cores are sliced, bagged and stored right away whereas some have been investigated with respect to anthropogenic impact, i.e. microplastics.

Photo 4 (megacoring): Processing samples from a megacorer. (1) Recovering the megacorer, (2) a single megacore tube on the sediment extraction table, (3) slicing sediments of a megacore tube and (4) sliced and bagged sediment samples. (Photos by: (1) Hong Chin Ng, (2, 4) Mélanie Douarin, (3) Jesse van der Grient)

ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) dives:

The main focus of this expedition was diving with the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) ISIS which is basically a robot of the size of a small car connected to the ship with a cable. An onboard CTD reported seawater properties, various cameras allowed online seafloor observation, two robotic arms used various tools for selective sample collection and a hydroacoustic system allowed ultra-high resolution seafloor mapping. At any time during a dive, at least three scientists and two pilots (rotating with replacement teams) were in the control unit making sure that we got the most out of every single dive. Such dives could be quite long and during JC094 we also established a new record of longest ISIS diving time, i.e. 43 hours and 43 minutes!

Photo 6: Operating the ROV ISIS from RRS James Cook. (1) Deploying the ROV, (2) insight into the control unit on deck housing screens for the various cameras and instruments onboard ISIS, (3) sample collection at the seafloor with one of the two mechanical arms, (4) recovery of ISIS with the port side A-frame crane and (5) ISIS is back on deck with some unexpected bycatch: fishing lines. (Photos by: (1) Mélanie Douarin, (2) Torben Struve, (3) ISIS, (4,5) Vanessa Fairbank)

Our ROV dive efforts focused on the collection of live and fossil (i.e. dead) sample material, and in particular on deep sea corals. With regard to investigations of past ocean properties, deep sea corals have the advantage of growing in places where sediment deposition is either lacking or discontinuous, i.e. for instance on steep slopes of seamounts and in high current environments. Our cruise track across the Atlantic was designed to target seamounts peaking up to more than 4000 m from the seafloor allowing us to collect samples over a wide depth range. Live coral specimen are used for calibration and method development purposes so that such methods may eventually be applied to fossil deep sea corals revealing secrets about past ocean properties.

Besides deep-sea corals, live specimens of various types of deep-sea species have been collected for DNA analyses which allow drawing conclusions about deep-sea species’ distribution patterns.

Furthermore, we also ran ultra-high resolution seafloor and habitat mapping campaigns with the ROV, trying to investigate potential links between bathymetry and deep-sea species’ habitats. Such data may be combined with the seawater data and thus, unraveling major biogeographical relationships between deep-sea biology, hydrography and bathymetry.

Photo 7: Impressions of deep-sea ROV dives during JC094. (Photos by: (1) Jesse van der Grient, others by ISIS)

The sample recovery from the ROV on deck had to be done quickly: all biological samples including live and fossil deep-sea corals were transferred into the cold room lab for identification, separation and documentation. Sediment and seawater samples collected with the ROV were processed separately from the biological samples. The fossil corals were separated from live samples and transferred into the deck lab for drying, sorting and identification – one of the most puzzling tasks on board!

Photo 8: Processing samples collected with the ROV. (1) Sample recovery from the various trays and boxes on ISIS, (2) samples placed in buckets, sorted by water depth and location, (3) sorting, documenting and archiving of biological samples in the cold room, (4) fossil deep-sea coral samples are transferred from the cold room into the deck lab for drying and identification, (5) dried and sorted fossil coral samples waiting for (6) photographing and bagging. (Photos by: (1) Vanessa Fairbank, (2,6) Mélanie Douarin, (3,4) Torben Struve, (5) Hong Chin Ng)

So we moved across the Atlantic Ocean collecting thousands of samples during the seven weeks and everybody was involved in processing all types of samples, preventing the work to become monotonous. Eventually, it came the time to say goodbye and after seven amazing weeks on board RRS James Cook expedition JC094 ended in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Everybody carried home memories of a great experience and scientific success at sea. Now, we’re looking forward to receiving the samples for detailed chemical analyses.

Find out more on the Tropics project website.